Suddenly, she reached out and seized her husband’s gun from the table beside her. Before she fully understood what she was doing, she clicked off the safety, rose from her chair, and stomped across the house, finally reaching the front door. Without hesitation, she flung the door open and stepped outside on the front stoop, swinging her gun right and left, sighting down the barrel, her finger tight on the trigger, ready to fire instantly.
Come on! Goddammit! Come on! I’m ready for you!
She thought she was shouting, but then she understood that her teeth were clenched tight, so tight that her jaw began to ache.
She pivoted to the right a second time, then repeated the movement to the left, a little like a top spinning on a table.
Finally, she lowered the weapon and flipped the safety switch back on. Sarah breathed out slowly, tasting fresh air and wondering whether she had been holding her breath for seconds, or a minute, or the entire day.
The gun suddenly felt heavy, and it bounced against her hip.
Sarah wanted to laugh.
No one in sight. No one walking up or down the street in front of her house. No cars moving past slowly. No one within her view at all.
They were all lucky, she thought. All the neighbors who never called on her anymore. All the strangers who might have taken that moment to amble past her house.
They were all lucky to be alive.
She told herself that she would have leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger and killed anyone she saw. It would have made no difference if one of them was the Big Bad Wolf or not. She had begun to think that everyone was the Big Bad Wolf.
She sighed and stepped back inside. Sarah had the odd thought that she had been completely forgotten in her neighborhood. No one wanted to catch the virus of despair that she carried. So no one acknowledged her existence. Not anymore.
I can stand naked in my window. I could walk naked down the street with my gun in my hand. I could dance naked in the center of the road firing shots wherever I liked and no one would pay any attention, she told herself. I have become invisible.
She was tempted to try. But instead, she went back inside, locking the door behind her and rearranging her flimsy homemade alarm system of cans and bottles, and returned to her computer screen.
A second thought slithered into her head: I’m invisible to everyone except one person. She could hear her breathing coming in short, tortured bursts. Sarah reached down and pressed the Play arrow with the barrel of her gun and began to watch what was posted another time.
But as she did so, she raised her weapon and aimed it at the images in front of her.
Red One’s YouTube video began in the same manner as Red Three’s-with the camera tracking rapidly through some anonymous stand of trees, like an animal moving quickly over familiar ground. When Red One saw this for the first time, she imagined that it was the woods behind her house. Had to be, she thought. A terrifying thought. Then the video dissolved into a long-distance shot of her in the back of the parking lot at the hospice, stealing one of her post-observed-death smokes, thinking naïvely that she was indulging in her dangerous vice alone and unobserved.
Red Two’s YouTube entry mimicked the others with its fast-filmed forest beginning. But hers faded into a shot taken through a car window in the parking lot of a big discount liquor store. It was a local store that Red Two knew all too well. The camera held that position for what seemed an interminable moment, until Red Two emerged through the wide glass doors of the store, arms filled with paper parcels jammed with liquor bottles. It tracked her to the point when she got into her car and drove unsteadily away down a familiar street.
Each minimovie had been taken at some time over the past months. The footage didn’t necessarily match the bleak early wintertime that trapped the three Reds. In the videos, trees were blanketed with leaves. The clothing spoke of a warmer season.
Two of the videos lingered on the final image. Red One’s froze on the wisps of cigarette smoke rising above her head. Red Three’s ended with her disappearing into her dormitory, as if swallowed up by evening shadows. But Red Two’s video had a gratuitous cruelty added to the end. After her car had exited the liquor store parking lot, the image had dissolved into another picture, one that when she saw it for the first time caused Red Two to keen out loud with an unrecognizable sound of pain:
A grave site. A headstone. Two names followed by the same date. Beloved husband. Beloved child. Dead.
12
It took great strength for Jordan to concentrate during the afternoon basketball practice. Every cut she made, every screen she set, every shot she took felt as if it was somehow misshapen or distorted. When she clanked an easy layup, rolling it off the front rim on a wide-open shot, there was the usual hooting from her teammates and a quick reprimand from an assistant admonishing her, “Take your time, Jordan, and finish!” But she imagined-even though the stands were completely empty-that someone else was watching her and that even the momentary lapse of a missed shot in the midst of a practice scrimmage meant something far bigger.
She believed that she should display no outward flaw. None whatsoever. Not even a momentary failure. Any weakness might be the route that the Big Bad Wolf used to catch her. Somehow, she had to be perfect in all things, even when she knew she was far from it, in order to keep the Big Bad Wolf away. This might make no sense whatsoever, but it pressed on her shoulders like a weight. She wondered whether the Big Bad Wolf was preventing her from jumping for a rebound. Maybe he could hold her down when he wasn’t even nearby, just by making her think he was.
Close, but not too close. Near, but not too near.
Jordan clenched her fists.
An idea came to her. She was running down the court, doing obligatory “suicides” at the end of the session: baseline to foul line and back, baseline to mid-court and back, baseline to far foul line and back, baseline to baseline and finish strong. Everyone hated the conditioning runs and everyone knew the value they held. Jordan typically finished first and prided herself on being able to make that extra effort. Her mind should have been cleared of everything except the pain and short-breath of exertion, but as she bent down to touch the far foul line, she realized that she had to find a way to contact the other two Reds, even if that just might be exactly what the Big Bad Wolf wanted. And she thought she knew how to do it.
She did not know if there was truth to the cliché Strength in numbers. She doubted it.
Jordan waited until late that evening before she opened up the YouTube video showing her walking to her dormitory. She had ignored most of her homework, spending hours staring at the computer’s background screen-a picture of the Earth taken from space-letting the minutes flow toward midnight. She told herself that even the Big Bad Wolf had to sleep sometime, and besides, what did he have to worry about? She and the other two Reds were the sleepless ones. The wolf probably slept soundly each night.
In one corner of the screen that displayed her video, there was the views counter. It seemed stuck on 5-which indicated the number of times she had watched it. She kept her eyes on that number. “Five five five,” she repeated to herself.
With a deep breath and the sensation that she was stepping into something unknown, Jordan reached for the keyboard and started typing rapidly.
First, she did a quick search using the keyword Red and ordering them by date. A menu arrived on her computer screen, a series of frozen images and a YouTube address. There was a punk leather-and-tattoo rock group and what she guessed was a family vacation and an avant-garde and probably pretentious artist in front of a vibrant red painting that was of something but she couldn’t tell what. But in the stack of potential answers to her search were two videos that showed nothing except a forest-like the beginning of hers.